A few week ago I’ve installed OSX 10.11 El Capitan on my mac. I was wondering why the Terminal showed my aways a permission denied error, when I tried to install an Ruby gem although I had root access enabled in the “System Preferences”. Two days later I found out that in OSX 10.11 El Capitan the root access is disabled. Apple is calling this feature “Rootless“. Rootless should prevent malware to compromise OSX. But for an developer, Rootless is quite annoying because the root access is often needed to install new software.
Anyway I found a method to enable root access in OSX 10.11 again.
- Reboot your mac and press cmd+R to boot into the mac OSX recovery system.
- After the recovery system has finished booting up, click to “Utilitys” from the top bar menu and choose “Terminal”
- Now type in following in the Terminal window and press enter:
csrutil disableRestart you mac, now you should have Rootless disabled. To enable it again, do the same steps and enter csrutil enable into the terminal. But remember if you disable this new security feature in OSX you are going to disable a great malware protection for your mac!
Comments